


Cold Lazarus

by ivorygates



Series: Across Five Aprils [8]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Daniverse, Episode: s01e08 Cold Lazarus, Gen, Girl!Daniel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-30
Updated: 2007-05-30
Packaged: 2017-11-25 23:07:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you find out more than you wanted to know without finding out anything at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold Lazarus

It's hard to isolate the most disturbing part about the whole mission, though nothing's actually disturbing at the time. Originally it's business as usual: ten-kilometer perimeter sweep through... absolutely nothing. Yellow pea-gravel, blue sky. The colors are as bright and primary as a children's book.

Near the Stargate they find a deep pit filled with crystal formations bluer than the sky; what they later discover is the _Goa'uld_ death pit. Nearly all have been slagged. It is a mass grave; artifact of a planetary holocaust. She has no notion of what she's looking at, and babbles about ritual offerings and ceremonial sites. Jack wanders off -- the pit is huge -- and is out of sight for several minutes. When he comes back, he's very quiet.

Well, the whole place is spooky.  
  
Only it isn't Jack, is it? It's an energy construct that one of the few intact crystals has formed.

But they all believe it _is_ Jack. Even her. Which is just annoying in retrospect. It acts oddly in the debrief, and none of them picks it up -- stands staring out at the Stargate the whole time, its back to them. Not like Jack; he'd find other ways to ignore them.

It's 0730 when they debrief; with one thing and another they went off on this one in the middle of the night. Sammy's program is popping out more destinations all the time, and right now they only have eight teams until General Hammond can put together a new SG-9. Six First Contact teams really, because -3 and -5 are Marines, and mainly go as backup. SG-1 is busy. Plus, they had to go when it was day there; no point in wandering around on an alien planet in the middle of the night if they didn't have to.

'Jack' leaves right after the debrief to change for home. She and Sam linger. General Hammond is working on getting them separate men's and women's changing rooms, but apparently it's a slow process. Meanwhile, there's a posted schedule.

The thing -- they still think it's Jack -- changes and leaves. She and Sammy change and stay.

Sam wants to know what the crystals _are_. Dani wants to know why they were where they were, and who put them there, since Sammy doesn't think it is a natural occurrence. And the presence of a Stargate implies the presence of a civilization, doesn't it? Though they've seen no sign of anything anywhere near the Gate except the pit full of crystals.

They have so little information to go on.

She can't make a theory if she doesn't have facts.

#

Sammy has a theory, though. The crystals were destroyed by Jaffa staff blasts. They go find Teal'c, sign out his staff-weapon, and test it. The Gateroom is big enough to get the range Sammy thinks is necessary, and they already know it can take a staff-blast hit without injury to the walls and floor, since when Apophis came here in the first place, his Jaffa fought with the soldiers.

In Sammy's eagerness to test her theory, she hasn't bothered to clear her experiment with General Hammond, though.

Oops.

But it does prove that the _Goa'uld_ gathered together -- and destroyed -- the blue crystals. It just doesn't tell them why.

Then they find out why.

Because the real Jack comes back through the Stargate, having nearly been killed when he touched an intact crystal, and they find out that the Jack they let off The Mountain almost twelve hours ago isn't just an alien energy creature with an unknown agenda that seems to be fixated on Jack's family...

But a rapidly-decaying nuclear power source.

They get it back. He takes it... home. It's blown up half of Colorado Springs Hospital but nobody's been killed. She does wonder what kind of cover story General Hammond is going to come up with.

It looks like Charlie now, not Jack.

They sent the other crystal back, too, the damaged one that gave them the clues they needed to solve the riddle. She doesn't know if that will help it, or if there's any way for the crystals to heal themselves. Is the 'Charlie'-crystal the only survivor of its race? She hopes not, even though this is disturbing on so many levels.

A few minutes later Jack dials back and comes home. From the expression on his face, she can tell that the whole matter is over and done with, especially those unexpected peeks into his personal history.

But -- just as a point of general interest -- it seems that Jack and Sara aren't over and done with. She's the one who left, but she obviously regrets it now. Their business, not Dani's, certainly, but things will be a little awkward when he can't discuss his work. Still, he'll have to explain the things Sara _has_ seen.

Like Charlie.

#

**Author's Note:**

> Some day I have to go back and do a better job with this one. I'm not terribly satisfied with it. It's a difficult episode to remix, since it's not only Jack-centric, for a lot of it Jack is just wandering around kind of off the grid.
> 
> I'd like to tie it in better to the SGC's first year, since there's a lot of background stuff going on at this time, of course. You see it surface in canon here and there, in episodes like "The First Commandment" and "The Nox" and (my absolute fave from this perspective) S2s "A Matter of Time", in which we are told in passing that Daniel is off working with another team for an extended period, Jack has been recommending people to the program (and not only do we meet Henry Boyd in passing, we also make the acquaintance of the ever-charming Frank Cromwell, also in passing; it's a rough ep in terms of Jack's friends and acquaintances), and Sam still needs to work on her people skills. So clearly, there's a lot of stuff going on at the SGC between and behind the stuff we see. And I am determined to drag it out into the light of fanfic.
> 
> So... not my best work, IMO. But here for completeness sake. (You may laugh now.)


End file.
